General availability: Azure Lab Services

Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Azure Lab Services is now generally available. With Azure Lab Services, you can set up on-demand access to preconfigured virtual machines. Users go to a single place to access all their VMs across multiple labs.

For classroom or professional training, you can provide students with a lab of virtual machines configured with exactly what they need. You can run a hackathon or a hands-on lab at conferences or events and scale up to hundreds of virtual machines for your attendees. You can also create an invitation-only private lab of virtual machines installed with your prerelease software to give preview customers access to early trials or set up interactive sales demos.

Top three reasons customers use Azure Lab Services:

Automatic management of Azure infrastructure and scale: Azure Lab Services is a managed service, which means that the service automatically handles provisioning and management of a lab's underlying infrastructure. You can just focus on preparing the right lab experience for your users.

Simple experience for your lab users: Users who are invited to your labs get immediate access to resources. They just sign in to see the full list of virtual machines that they can access. They don't need Azure subscriptions to use the service.

Cost optimization and tracking: Keep your budget in check by controlling how many hours your lab users can use the virtual machines. Allow users to use virtual machines only during designated time slots, or set up recurring auto-shutdown and start times. Keep track of individual users' usage.

Azure Lab Services GA pricing goes into effect on May 1, 2019. Until then, you will continue to be billed based on the preview pricing. See the Azure Lab Services pricing page for details.